Students and faculty of the University of Calgary’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape (SAPL) are celebrating their new home this week as they move into its new vertical campus in downtown Calgary that’s been eight years in the making. “We like to say that our address is 801 Seventh Avenue, but our classrooms are the streets,” said SAPL Dean John Brown. “Our classrooms and our studios are out in the streets and in the same way that a medical student learns by being at a hospital bed, a design student, a city builder, needs to be in the city.” Brown says the school’s goal is to be the most community-embedded design school in North America and the most entrepreneurial design school in the world with a focus on impact, relevance and change. “The world has got a lot of problems going on right now, and a lot of them have to do with the built environment and the way in which people relate to that and the energy impact,” he said. “What we really need to do is come up with fresh ideas that we can implement quickly to impact positive change for quality of life, and it starts in downtown Calgary as a lab.” Brown says the school and its more than 1,200 students will be a catalyst to revitalize the city’s west side and create a place where people feel safe and want to come. He says the school alone isn’t big enough to sustain that change, but it is enough to start it. “Students are going to be working and most of them will be living down here, that will start to create a different kind of hospitality, new kinds of entertainment, new kinds of retail,” he said. “That will then draw more students, people then feel safer because there’s more people on the street, I think this is the beginning of a kind of rebirth of what west-end Calgary is going to be and it’s going to be one of the hot spots of the city.” Luis Campuzano is in his second year of the master’s program at SAPL and says the new facility is a step up from the old campus. “Our workshop was split before from main campus and the facilities we had,” he said. “Now everything is in the same building together and that’s awesome for us.” Campuzano says in the old facility, he and other students had to work a little harder to complete projects but now that’s not the case. “You had to do your work in spite of the facilities kind of thing,” he said. “Now there’s no obstacles to us moving forward.” Students and faculty have been in the new space since January 2026 to work out any problems with the building during the summer break. Now as the 2026 fall school semester is well underway, they’re celebrating the new space with a grand opening event Sept. 23 from 3:30 to 6 p.m. at Century Gardens. Learn more about it here.
